A note on the Amazon ads: I've chosen to display current events titles in the Amazon box. Unfortunately, Amazon appears to promote a disproportionate number of angry-left books. I have no power over it at this time. Rest assured, I'm still a conservative.

Sunday, July 10, 2005

Rehabilitating Joseph Wilson: Once America's most prestigious paper, The New York Times continues to go down the tubes. Today's column by Frank Rich would be acceptable, if questionable, journalism had it been published on or before July 6, 2004. Today, it's just a big correction waiting to happen -- that is, if editorial page editor Gail Collins had an ounce of journalistic ethics. [For the record: My request for a correction to an false statement in a Times editorial has elicitied only an automated response from public editor Byron Calame.]

WHEN John Dean published his book "Worse Than Watergate" in the spring of 2004, it seemed rank hyperbole: an election-year screed and yet another attempt by a Nixon alumnus to downgrade Watergate crimes by unearthing worse "gates" thereafter. But it's hard to be dismissive now that my colleague Judy Miller has been taken away in shackles for refusing to name the source for a story she never wrote. No reporter went to jail during Watergate. No news organization buckled like Time. No one instigated a war on phony premises. This is worse than Watergate.

In other words, back in June 2004 Frank Rich had not completely succumbed to Bush Derangement Syndrome -- that's changed now. As the Wall Street Journal has pointed outnumerous times, this is not the Bush White House "getting" reporters. This is an independent prosecutor gone wild -- an independent prosecutor that the Times and the rest of the mainstream media demanded.

Specifically, it began with the former ambassador Joseph Wilson's July 6, 2003, account on the Times Op-Ed page (and in concurrent broadcast appearances) of his 2002 C.I.A. mission to Africa to determine whether Saddam Hussein had struck a deal in Niger for uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson concluded that there was no such deal, as my colleague Nicholas Kristof reported, without divulging Mr. Wilson's name, that spring. But the envoy's dramatic Op-Ed piece got everyone's attention: a government insider with firsthand knowledge had stepped out of the shadows of anonymity to expose the administration's game authoritatively on the record. He had made palpable what Bush critics increasingly suspected, writing that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."

Up until that point, the White House had consistently stuck by the 16 incendiary words in President Bush's January 2003 State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The administration had ignored all reports, not just Mr. Wilson's, that this information might well be bogus. But it still didn't retract Mr. Bush's fiction some five weeks after the State of the Union, when Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, announced that the uranium claim was based on fake documents. Instead, we marched on to war in Iraq days later. It was not until Mr. Wilson's public recounting of his African mission more than five months after the State of the Union that George Tenet at long last released a hasty statement (on a Friday evening, just after the Wilson Op-Ed piece) conceding that "these 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president."

This would be well and good had it been published before the Senate Intelligence Committee report, but today they are nothing more than lies. To put Rich and Wilson, in the best possible light I refer you to FactCheck.org.

The famous "16 words" in President Bush's Jan. 28, 2003 State of the Union address turn out to have a basis in fact after all, according to two recently released investigations in the US and Britain.

Bush said then, "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa ." Some of his critics called that a lie, but the new evidence shows Bush had reason to say what he did.

A British intelligence review released July 14 calls Bush's 16 words "well founded."

A separate report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee said July 7 that the US also had similar information from "a number of intelligence reports," a fact that was classified at the time Bush spoke.

Ironically, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who later called Bush's 16 words a "lie", supplied information that the Central Intelligence Agency took as confirmation that Iraq may indeed have been seeking uranium from Niger .

Both the US and British investigations make clear that some forged Italian documents, exposed as fakes soon after Bush spoke, were not the basis for the British intelligence Bush cited, or the CIA's conclusion that Iraq was trying to get uranium.

None of the new information suggests Iraq ever nailed down a deal to buy uranium, and the Senate report makes clear that US intelligence analysts have come to doubt whether Iraq was even trying to buy the stuff. In fact, both the White House and the CIA long ago conceded that the 16 words shouldn't have been part of Bush's speech.

But what he said - that Iraq sought uranium - is just what both British and US intelligence were telling him at the time. So Bush may indeed have been misinformed, but that's not the same as lying.

So: what Wilson actually told the CIA, contrary to his own oft-repeated claims, is that he was told by the former mining minister of Niger that in 1998, Iraq had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium from that country, and that Iraq's overture was renewed the following year. What Wilson reported to the CIA was exactly the same as what President Bush said in his 2003 State of the Union address: there was evidence that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa.

Recall Wilson's famous op-ed in the New York Times, published on July 6, 2003, which ignited the whole firestorm over the famous "sixteen words" in Bush's State of the Union speech. In that op-ed, Wilson identified himself as the formerly-unnamed person who had gone to Niger to investigate rumors of a possible uranium deal between Iraq and Niger. Here are the key words in Wilson's article:

[I]n January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa. The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them.

It was this flat-out lie about what Wilson learned in Niger, and what he reported to the CIA upon his return, that fueled the "sixteen words" controversy and led to the publication of Wilson's best-selling account, titled, ironically, The Politics of Truth.

One can only conclude that Joseph Wilson has perpetrated one of the most astonishing hoaxes in American history. But here is what I really don't get: didn't the administration have access to all of this information about Wilson's report? And if so, why didn't they use it when Wilson was dominating the news cycle with his lies?

Despite all of this, Rich is attempting to writes as though the Senate Intelliegence Committee investigation never happened. Rich goes on to slime the Bush administration for continuing to pursue some conspiracy to "get" Wilson. Of course, this might make sense if Wilson still has any credibility -- he doesn't, but Rich can get away with this only by ignoring the problem.

I'm also amused at Rich's complaint about the timing of releasing information on Fridays. You'd think that he'd just drop the entire idea for good after it bites him on the butt.

The New York Times is a propaganda rag nowadays. It's disturbing just how far it has fallen in such a short time.

Re Powerline's question: "[D]idn't the administration have access to all of this information about Wilson's report? And if so, why didn't they use it when Wilson was dominating the news cycle with his lies?"

The administration (in the person of CIA director Tenet) DID reveal Wilson's lie five days after it appeared in the NYT. The NYT and the rest of the MSM continued to ignore the fact until the 9/11 commission report revealed Wilson's lie again a year later (and as you note, they are still ignoring it).

The actual date after which Rich's position became slanderous malfeasance was July 12th, 2003. Tenet's statement:

In an effort to inquire about certain reports involving Niger, CIA's counter-proliferation experts, on their own initiative, asked an individual with ties to the region to make a visit to see what he could learn.

He reported back to us that one of the former Nigerian officials he met stated that he was unaware of any contract being signed between Niger and rogue states for the sale of uranium during his tenure in office.

The same former official also said that in June 1999 a businessman approached him and insisted that the former official meet with an Iraqi delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations" between Iraq and Niger.

The former official interpreted the overture as an attempt to discuss uranium sales.

The NYT hid the fact that Wilson lied on their pages. Kurtz at the Washington Post ran a lexis search and found that the NYT had run 70 Wilson stories in the year after his accusations, virtually all of which they knew to be lies.

I first wrote a post on this in September of '03, in a piece I wrote for the Stanford Review on how the California papers covered this and other biased stories. Link here. (Scroll down to the last example of California media bias.) I also have a post on my blog from last August.

While I agree with all your points (as it's fairly difficult a rational minded person to ignore facts) I feel that calling the Times a ‘propaganda rag’ is counterproductive to news that the times reports that may benefit your views and cause. Yes, the drivel from Krugman and Dowd for years now has ruined many a morning but I still routinely see many NYT's pieces linked on right-wing blogs and mistakes and lies withstanding, they are still a news organization. I think the best approach is to merely discredit any story with errors, as you have done here, while avoiding the implication that all NYT’s news is false or biased.

Readers of Hoystory can express their views without resorting to profanities. If you need to use certain terms to express your views, you're free to visit DailyKos, Democratic Underground or Indymedia where those vulgarities are as common as commas.

Since Frank Rich is likely to set the conventional wisdom for NY Times readers, it is worth picking out some of his other suppositions and errors:

...it was Mr. Wilson's flat refutation of it that drove administration officials to seek their revenge: they told the columnist Robert Novak that Mr. Wilson had secured his (nonpaying) African mission through the nepotistic intervention of his wife, a covert C.I.A. officer whom they outed by name.

"By name"? Wilson made a big deal of this at the time, but Novak pointed out that Wilson's bio in "Who's Who" included his wife's maiden name. And an INR memo explaining how Wilson got picked for the trip (all described in the Senate Intel report) did not use Ms. Wilson's last name, either.

This is at best a supposition by Rich, rather than "reality-based" reporting.

Political pressure didn't force Mr. Ashcroft to relinquish control of the Wilson investigation to a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, until Dec. 30, 2003, more than five months after Mr. Novak's column ran.

Fantasy - here is a Keep Hope Alive Dec 26 post from ardent lefty Mark Kleiman noting that the DoJ had added another prosecutor and telling us that "If we don't hear something from the Justice Department by the time Congress gets back in January, I expect Schumer et al. to start kicking up a fuss again."

And if we can rely on their search engine, the name "Plame" had last appeared in the NY Times editorial/op-ed section in October 2003. Yeah, Bush was feeling the heat, all right.

I remember seeing an interview with Novak shortly after this fuss began, in which he said that he had been visiting with a top Democratic Party person---I think it may have been the head of the DNC at that time----and when Novak made some comment about Wilson, the Dem replied, in a very close paraphrase of Novak's quote "Oh, Joe's not so bad. And his wife even works for the CIA."

In other words, a top Dem party offical, in trying to make Joe Wilson sound less left-wing and offensive to Novak, tried to point out he was not really so far left at all, proved by the fact his wife worked for the CIA. Novak went on to say, in this interview, that Plame's employment with the CIA was well-known in the Beltway, and not a secret at all.

As for her reinvention as a "covert operative" it seems highly unlikely that the wife of an assistant to an ambassador, or an acting ambassador (NOT an ambassador himself, as so often claimed) could or would be a very effective covert agent. As all employees and spouses in all embassies are assumed to have CIA ties, by the locals of the country in which they are posted, it would be an odd choice to actually use one of these suspected agents as an agent. And even odder to think she could operate with any degree of anonymity, which would seem to be a pretty desirable trait for a real 'covert agent'.

"Anonymous" Tom Maguire notes that Rich ass/u/me/s that the administration used Plame's name. But the only concrete evidence we possess so far, Cooper's e-mail, says only that Rove mentioned Wilson's "wife." Isikoff's story in Newsweek says there's no evidence that Rove used her name.

So Rich is just making stuff up. I'm glad guys like this are to snobbish to blog -- they'd tarnish our reputation.

I think propoganda sheet is a little too strong, but it's obvious that the Times editorial page columnists and editors are, genereally speaking, absolutely indifferent to the truth.